Styling in Espalier : a spreadsheet tool for manipulation of structured data

Abstract

The spreadsheet is a commonly-used programming tool, useful for a wide variety of data-driven tasks. They, however, lack the capability of robustly representing and manipulating structured data. Espalier is a new spreadsheet-based programming paradigm which uses a powerful scoped-splits model that more easily handles structured data. This thesis focuses on adding styling capabilities to Espalier in order to allow users to build responsive websites. Overall, the thesis makes two contributions: First, we create a styling menu and implement the set of styling parameters associated with allocations and spans listed in the menu. Second, we style the design view of our sheets using those parameters to highlight the underlying structure. In the following chapters, we will describe our styling implementation, how it is utilized in its design view, and provide two applications to demonstrate its capability, flexibility, and ease of use.